Scientists made an artificial cell. It's alive, and it has completely synthesized genom, made in laboratory.

BBC News - Newsnight - Venter: Artificial living cell will benefit humanity

Yes and no.  It has some of the characteristics of what we call "life".   I actually think it will be a long time before the remaining gap is closed.

"Completely synthesized" is mostly hype. The genome has been pieced together from sequences copied from the DNA of living creatures.  It's like someone stole parts from junk cars and succeeded in creating something that has no engine, but at least steers and rolls downhill.  

Yes and no.  It has some of the characteristics of what we call "life".   I actually think it will be a long time before the remaining gap is closed.
 

could be, or "That's one small step for a single cell, one giant leap for mankind."

I'd call what they're doing at this point "hacking" or "tinkering" with life, rather than "engineering".  But there's no doubt where this is leading.   

And Craig Venter is exactly the sort of big-ego high-rolling risk-taker that could create a major disaster - and then blame others.

I can imagine many disasters.  Man always believes he has things under control, until a disaster happens, especially when he believes he has everything under control. 

"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray." 
"What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder."
Aldous Huxley in Brave New World

Jurassic Park! 

There can be a positive side, curing "incurable" diseases for example, regenerating limbs, organs, eyes... all kinds of other things.

Extreme caution is necessary, but I have a feeling that it won't be a major issue in our lifetime.

I once read a fictional book about a scientist having created an "elixir of youth" and the moral and ethical consequences of it were discussed along the story.  In the end, the person who recovers the recipe decided to throw it away. 

Yes, there are many positive advances in medical and other sciences, but we must be very, very careful.

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I can't see anything positive coming out of this.  Even curing diseases and improving health is not positive when the world is so population heavy.  We have science and medicine prolonging life, we have politicians and religion encouraging the increase in population yet we're living in a world where natural resources are becoming more and more scarce. 

In 50 years they may cured AIDS and cancer but what will they do about people dying from hunger and thirst and killing each other for a handful of rice?  We cannot sustain ourselves at the rate we're growing.

This is the real problem facing humanity. There is no one in the political arena with the guts to face up to these problems, which is largely the fault of the political system. If anyone ties to impose any type of population control they will simply be voted out. Even China is backing away from their one child policy. An ageing population and an economic system that relies on constant growth are factors most easily resolved in the short term by population increase, and no one seems to have an eye on the medium to long term.
If I hear scientists talking about the need to feed a population of 9 billion by 2050 one more time I'm going to scream. It's like there is no understanding of cause and effect. Increasing resource production is what drives population growth. This is true everywhere in nature, why would it be different for people? I can guarantee that if there is only food for 6 billion people there will only be a population of 6 billion people. The population can't eat air!
The sooner we get to grips with this the more humanely it can be dealt with, there needs to be limits set on the number of children people are allowed to have. The alternative is that we continue to squeeze as many resources out of the planet as we possible can till the population reaches the absolute limit that can be sustained, by which point everyone will be barely subsisting.
If the global population can be stabilised we will actually be able to feed everyone, rather than what happens now where any attempt to increase resources in an area of shortage causes the population to increase and the same problems to occur on a larger scale in future.

I find this development very troubling.  If this �cell� fines a hospitable habitat who knows what the Darwinian consequence will be.  Will this cell have parasitic properties either now or later, will it mutate into something that can harm the environment or other live forms? If one thinks in terms of  Chaos Theory this is not good news.

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This is old news.  Mutant parasitic one-celled organisms like lawyers and microstockers have been around for a long time.

Old hippie/Macrosaur is back 

Scientists made an artificial cell. It's alive, and it has completely synthesized genom, made in laboratory.

Not exactly. The cell itself was natural, only the DNA was synthesized, and only the main unit and not the mytochondrial DNA. The info content was also copied from another cell, not designed from scratch. Apart from that, the construction was totally synthetic, yes.

Now it's time for the preachers, the creationists and the religious, climatewarming and green fundamentalists to start yelling booh, sin, Frankenstein. Just like with the advent of the steam train mid 19-th century their brother and sister Cassandras yelled that the cows near the rail tracks would stop giving milk.

In fact, this is just a cheaper, faster and more secure replacement for the technique of recombinant DNA with enzymes used as bio-scissors in vitro real DNA. This latter technique has been around for almost 4 decades. In a previous life, I have been involved somehow with the development of bacteria producing human insulin this way, a protein that benefited countless diabetics that showed to be allergic to animal insulin, that was moreover very costly to extract from loads of killed donor animals.